It’s an ongoing battle of epic proportions taking place in every office of every company in the world – completing tasks efficiently by multi-tasking or effectively by staying “in-the-flow.” I recently came across a post on the teehan+lax blog (they specialize is user-oriented design) that helped summarize the argument. Specifically, the blog links to some interesting arguments that have me thinking about productivity and (capital ‘F’) Flow.

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” describes Flow as:

“Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Benjamin B. Bederson, “Interfaces for Staying in the Flow” uses the following diagram to explain Flow as the channel between challenge and skill; the tension between anxiety and boredom:

Contrast this with what we now know about multi-tasking; specifically, that multi-tasking is not so much about doing multiple things at once, but rather efficiently switching between tasks. From the 2001 NY Times article “How to Multitask“:

“Don’t think you can actually do two things at once. Even when you think you’re doing more than one thing simultaneously—say, driving and talking on a cell phone—you aren’t. Unlike a computer, the brain isn’t structured as a parallel processor. It performs actions, even very simple actions, in a strict linear sequence. You must complete the first task, or part of that task, before moving on to the next. What we call multitasking is actually task switching.”

It strikes me that businesses and technology vendors have done a lot of thinking about how improve productivity through multi-tasking, but little thought has gone into the importance of Flow in a knowledge work environment.